An image sensor is an electronic device that converts light (in the form of an optical image) into electronic signals. Modern image sensors are generally semiconductor charge-coupled devices (“CCD”) or active pixel sensors fabricated using complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (“CMOS”) technologies.
CMOS image sensors have become ubiquitous in many modern electronic devices. Cell phones, laptops, and cameras can all utilize CMOS image sensors as a primary method of image/light detection. Device manufacturers are striving to increase performance of image sensors to meet retail and commercial demand while also driving down costs.
One desired feature of image sensors is to have a high-frame rate for capturing slow-motion video and bursts of images, among other use cases. Buyers of image sensors also prefer these high-frame rate images be captured using a high resolution image sensor. However, capturing high-resolution, high-frame rate images creates bottleneck challenges between capturing the images with the image sensor pixels of the pixel array and storing the digital images to memory. Hence, improving the flow and speed of capturing images and storing them to memory while keeping both the size and cost of the image sensor at reasonable levels is desirable.